Isle of Ormer, Now
Charlie was sitting cross-legged on the bed, staring down at three pages of Charlie Joneses. There were tears in her eyes.
She knew they were coming—Oliver had messaged ahead—but when she heard Berty’s voice on the other side of the door, she felt suddenly paralyzed.
I’m not ready, she thought, Oh, please, I’m not ready.
The door swung open in the face of her silence, and there he was: brow furrowed in concern, cap backward, polo shirt a little too tight.
He always did shrink things in the dryer, she found herself thinking—even at a time like this, Charlie’s brain would not entirely dedicate itself solely to one single thing.
“Berty?” she whispered.
It was too good to be true. She was not allowed to see him yet—she was not three months sober.
But here he was, her gorgeous giant of a husband, in the Nicole family farmhouse.
It was a scene she had painstakingly created on her mood board and thought of every single day.
The farmhouse, the love of her life, and behind him…
Her sister.
“Oh,” she said, on an inhale. Everything ran through her head at once: her hair was in childish pigtails to keep it out of her face while she was reading, she wasn’t wearing the dress she’d set aside for meeting Rosie, she wasn’t ready, she wasn’t ready…
But it all evaporated within seconds, because Rosie’s eyes were just like her own, and they too were full of tears.
“It’s you,” Charlie choked out.
“You’re Charlie Jones?” Rosie breathed.
“Who isn’t?” Charlie said, grinning through her tears as she swung her legs off the bed and met Rosie halfway.
They stopped abruptly, face-to-face and just as breathless as each other.
Charlie was ten years older than Rosie, and looking at her younger sister was dizzying—she had never seen herself in somebody else in this way, never known her own features on another face.
Rosie’s curls were tighter than hers, and mousier; they were held back from her face with a yellow silk scarf, and her earrings were little wooden cherries.
Charlie couldn’t get enough of the details: the slightly wonky eyeliner, the Charlie-like dip in the center of her chin, the tremble in her bottom lip. Everything about her was perfect.
“You know,” Rosie said, reaching a tentative hand to cup her sister’s cheek, “you might choose to call yourself Charlie Jones, but to me, you’re Charlie Nicole.”
—
They sat together on the back step, underneath a blanket Rosie said their mother had knitted, and they talked. Their hands met often—Rosie was affectionate, but tentative, a little afraid—Is it OK for me to say that? she’d say, stumbling over herself. There was just so much to tell.
Berty was there, a quiet, solid, reassuring presence in the corner of Charlie’s vision, as he had been for so much of her life—her nurturer of a husband, a sweetheart in a frat boy’s disguise.
She knew he’d followed her out here to the island because he was worried about her, and she was fiercely proud that he had no need to be: she was seventy days sober.
But she also knew that he was here because after two months of constant messaging, he was nudging her to take the step back to him.
Charlie had always struggled with the final leap—Berty was the one who helped her jump.
Today, though, Berty hung back. This afternoon was about Charlie and Rosie.
Eventually the autumn chill drove the sisters back inside.
On her way through, Charlie paused in the doorway of the farmhouse living room, looking at the back wall, which was painted in an extraordinary work of art.
It was clearly about the island, though it was abstract enough that Charlie couldn’t pinpoint precisely why she knew that—it was the colors, the feeling.
And through the golds and greens of its scenery were tiny scenes: figures conjured in a few brushstrokes, some meeting, some hand in hand, some walking away.
“It’s the story of our family,” Rosie said, moving past her to lift her hand to the wall. “Toby painted it for me. He’s an amazing local artist—he’ll be famous one day. Here.” She pressed her finger to a scene in the center. “This is you.”
“What?” Charlie said, her voice catching. She stepped forward.
“I didn’t tell Toby the specifics—Doc Laurry was the only one on the island who knew about you, and of course he wouldn’t tell a soul, because of patient confidentiality.
Mum and Grandma moved to the mainland when they found out Mum was pregnant at sixteen, and the family kept the pregnancy a secret—Mum and Dad were so young, I suppose.
I wanted to honor their choice to keep that part of their story back from the islanders.
And I wanted to honor you, too. I wanted it to be your decision to make yourself known to your wider Ormer family once you were ready. But I did ask Toby to add in a baby.”
The tiny figure was wrapped in a cream brushstroke of blanket and caught in a swirl of sea spray, or cloud, perhaps.
“You were a secret, but you were always at the heart of the story. That’s how I see it.” She swallowed, tracing the baby’s tiny cheek. “I like to think they would have told me about you, one day, if they’d lived. I have to believe they would have.”
“Do you know…why…” The sentence died in Charlie’s throat.
Rosie shook her head, her eyes filling with tears again.
“I’m sorry. I know so little. I felt so angry about that, after they died—the way they kept you from me.
But if you’d like to, I’d love to try to find out more together.
Lots of people here on the island knew Mum when she was a teenager, for instance.
I’ve never started those conversations, because it didn’t feel right to without you, but… ”
Charlie nodded, unable to speak. Rosie’s smile was soft. She looked back at the painting, pointing.
“And this is me,” she said.
There was a young woman—a teenage girl, maybe, wild haired in loose, bright clothes. She was shading her eyes with her hand, searching for something in the swirls of color around her.
“Looking for you,” Rosie said.
Charlie’s throat tightened. She pressed her fingertip to the baby at the center of the painting.
Baby Charlie. I love you, she thought, as she looked at that helpless child, and it seemed so obvious that the tiny lost baby deserved nothing but love—a revelation to Charlie, who had always believed she was intrinsically, fundamentally unworthy of it.
When Charlie breathed in again and wiped her eyes, Rosie was there, smiling, waiting for her.
“There’s something else I’d like to show you. If you think you’re ready to see more?”
She led Charlie through to the kitchen and bent to pull a small keepsake box from the bottom of the large dresser behind the well-worn dog bed.
Charlie thought for an instant of the box under the sink in her flat, packed with vodka, whisky and gin, and another warm wave of pride moved through her.
So many parts of Charlie had been hidden away, waiting for her to be brave enough to show them.
And now she had nothing left to face. Charlie had owned her drinking problem.
She had come here to meet her sister, and Rosie had welcomed her with warmth and love.
She had lost Berty, and then she had lost Fearne, and through the awful days of grief she had discovered the priceless truth that she could exist without the two of them to bolster her.
“I’m ready,” she said.
The box held many details of Rosie’s search for Charlie, but it also contained everything Rosie had found when their parents had died. A tiny gray knitted hat. A photograph of a baby, fingered so many times the little bundle was almost unrecognizable as a baby at all. And a note.
I want you to know, it read, that I will always love you. I can’t be your mama. But you will always be my baby.
“I think she wanted it to go with you, to your new family,” Rosie said. “But for whatever reason—oh, sweetheart.”
Charlie could hold it in no longer. She had begun to sob.
Rosie held her. She smelled of roses and Parma Violets, and she hugged Charlie the way Charlie longed to be hugged—like she would never let her go.
—
The rest of the afternoon was an extraordinary, glorious blur. New faces, a new home, as she was assured it was—a whole farm that she had imagined a million times but that turned out to be both more beautiful and considerably muddier than she had ever anticipated.
And Aspen. Aspen was a surprise.
Charlie had been given a very brief rundown of the whole situation after meeting Rosie, and had absorbed approximately ten percent of it, registering only the important fact that Berty seemed as displeased by Aspen’s presence on Ormer as she was.
It was only later, when she caught sight of Aspen talking quietly with Berty in the living room, that she dedicated any time and energy to the woman who had, apparently, decided to steal her dream life.
She folded her arms as she entered the room, leveling her gaze at Aspen.
As adults, they’d only spoken properly once, at Brianna and Stuart’s wedding; Charlie had liked her, then.
She was beautiful, just like Brianna—the resemblance was uncanny, despite Aspen having dyed that amazing ginger hair brown.
Charlie marveled to feel none of the usual envy pass through her.
Siblings used to fill her with longing, but now, she had her own.
She scanned Aspen, trying to compile everything she knew about her. She was a midwife; she’d always done well in school, the good-girl counterpoint to Brianna’s rebelliousness. She was perpetually dating, never with much success. And, judging by Oliver’s recent emails, she was pregnant.
With a dizzying shot of fear, Charlie considered the possibility that it could be Berty’s baby.
But no, he’d broken up with Aspen in July, and it was October now.
Surely Aspen would be showing, and her stomach was conspicuously flat in her low-rise jeans and tank top.
She didn’t look pregnant at all, in fact.
“So. You stole my job,” Charlie said to Aspen. “It was Brianna who came up with the whole plan, presumably?”
It was hardly surprising—Bri had been the one who’d planted the idea in Charlie’s head, too.
That’s it? You just turn up with this letter and say “Hi, I’m Charlie Jones”?
she’d said, and when Charlie had looked across the kitchen table at Oliver, her kind, sad, broken friend, those words had come back to her.
“I’m so sorry,” Aspen said. Her eyes were wet; she was holding back tears. “If I’d had any idea that this place meant so much to you…”
“It’s fraud, you know, what you did,” Charlie said.
“And what I did,” Oliver said from behind her.
She turned to look at him. Berty-lite, as she’d thought of him—but with Berty actually here, the contrast was more apparent.
Berty was taller, more assertively muscular; Oliver had the compact build of a mountain biker, just as Fearne had had, and his energy was milder, more subtle.
He paled beside Berty’s clear-cut edges.
Charlie immediately scolded herself for the comparison—Oliver was her friend, and she loved him dearly.
“You could have told me, you know,” Oliver said gently. “I would still have come, and told you everything you wanted to know.”
“Nobody knew about Rosie but Fearne and Berty,” she said.
She locked eyes with Berty. There was a fierce pleasure in his face that made her shiver with delight. They had always been like this—all fire and strength and unity. Even now, with Oliver and Aspen in the room, she felt and resented every centimeter of the space between them.
“I see,” Oliver said.
And he probably did. Charlie had never met anybody as understanding as Oliver.
Could she have stopped drinking without that?
She wasn’t sure, but for a brief moment in their lives, Berty had not been able to reach her, and Oliver had.
Charlie returned her attention to Aspen.
Had she been that for Berty? Had she given him something Charlie couldn’t?
She loathed the very thought, but Berty did seem a little different, somehow.
Less inclined to step in and save her, perhaps—and that would be good for them, now that Charlie had learned she could save herself.
“I’m so glad you decided to come here,” Aspen said, “and I’m so happy for you and Rosie.”
“All’s well that ends well, is that what you’re trying to say?” Charlie said, but she didn’t like the sharpness in her own voice, and felt her shoulders sag.
She did not actually feel particularly angry with Aspen for stealing her job and her name. It was the kind of joyfully chaotic, ballsy thing Charlie herself might dream of doing. She just hated her because she’d had some small piece of Berty, and Charlie would never be able to abide that.
But it seemed that Aspen had found a home here.
She had her own shit to deal with, if she really was pregnant—Charlie found herself feeling a little sorry for her.
Plus everyone else seemed to like her, interestingly, even Marly, Rosie’s delightfully take-no-shit wife, and that woman everyone called Galoshes, who Charlie had thus far only heard complaining about things.
And Oliver. Oliver definitely liked her, which Charlie begrudgingly had to admit was a point in her favor—Oliver was an excellent judge of character. After all, he’d chosen her, and Fearne.
“Tell me if there is something I can do to make up for what I’ve done,” Aspen said, “and I’ll do it.”
That was an interesting offer.